INTERESTING TIMES

Some of the trees up here been playing havoc with our way of life, and folks 'round these parts won't stand for it, nosir.

For example there's the big chunk of incipient firewood from the gargantuoak a few hundred meters above here whose monstrous branch was lowverhanging the road and was cut down a couple of months ago before it could crush somebody, its superbulk then being rolled over the roadside edge into the bamboo and down toward the stream before the cutters knew that I was a firewood type person and would want it, so later I found out it was ok for me to take it away, but now I'll have to stand on that steep slope as if beside a nervous elephant and chainsaw the mass into half-meter segments weighing about 300 k each that I'll have to stay out of the way of, then have to split and quarter in situ so as to render them liftable to the road above. Love those kinds of tasks...

After that I can tackle the big oak on a transverse road thereabove that the recent hurricane blew over onto some power wires, causing a multihour blackout up there until the power company cut it down in big sections and shoved it into the woods where it now belongs to me but I won't get to that for a week or two beyond the first cache, though whats the hurry, since no way will it ever be dry in time to use this winter, even with the impossible miracle of constant sunlight during the rainy season plus the worst of global warming. It's warmth for the winter of 2012-13, if we're still here then, given the ongoing govern/mental revelations of Fukushima, but even so I'm going to try to leave the split wood out in the sunniest, breeziest place...

Then I'll have Azuma-san fell those three big crowdy oaks that our upmountain neighbor girded because they need the sunlight on their house, so when that's done I should have enough firewood to last until the world economy has successfully collapsed and everyone has gotten used to bottom line frugality so we can hopefully move on to essential changes.

We do live in interesting times, do we not...

AZUMA-SAN

One afternoon over the weekend I was at home alone working in my upstairs zone of solitude when I heard what sounded like a truck pull up in front of the house and thought it must be a delivery of some kind, so started to get up to go to the door, when I heard a truck door slam and a loud voice talking, so I then thought it must be a couple of the propane guys come to check the tanks or something, but then the voice went around the front of the house instead of out back where the tanks are, then out in front of the deck I heard this loud conversation, no one from the road ever goes there, because there's a chain across the driveway and its just... private, and privacy is pretty much boilerplate around here, so I went downstairs and looked out front to see who was walking around on our property talking so loud about what, maybe someone from the water committee or something, assuming that we're not home because our car wasn't there (Echo was out doing some shopping and yogaing) but when I looked out front there was no one, the voice had moved elsewhere already, out among the firewood and into the garden, so I went to the big kitchen window and looked out at where the voice now was and saw an agile elderly fellow poking his head in among the stacks of firewood and saying something I couldn't hear, no one else around, he was talking to himself, went here and there looking and talking, then he turned and I recognized him, it was Azuma-san, the elderly expert who felled a few worrisome trees for us, climbs giant oaks like a 12 year old but with a chain saw, then stands way up there and trims the mighty tree to a new and more cooperative elegance, in a display of arboreal agility that would even be impressive in a 25-year-old - he's about 80 now - and there he was, poking around among the wood and talking to himself like a solo lumberjack, so I went outside and called his name, said good day, turned out he'd come to ask about our woodstove, was very curious about how much it cost, how it was made, how well it worked and so on, seems he wants to get one for himself. If anybody can make good use of a woodstove, it's Azuma-san. In a fair exchange, he gave me some good tips on my hiratake mushroom growing. Then he roared off in his big truck, on his way to the next big tree.

LUMBERJACK

This was lumberjacking weekend. There were a couple of teetering cedars right out front, leaning over the house and just waiting for a hurricane; a dead cedar right out back that was about 30 meters tall and slowly degrading, also just waiting for a hurricane, and an unbalanced oak that had to be professionally trimmed so that a reasonable amount of sunlight can fall on the garden when I figure out the sci-fi plans for my new anti-monkey fencing.

We called the local hub for such matters, and contracted for a crew who came on Saturday. The crew was a small bent-over man going on 80 years old! Echo and I stood there filling with doubt as he got out of his truck, sat down on the stone wall to put on his work boots and then asked for some salt to use in the purification ceremony before starting work.

Our doubts lasted until Mr. Azuma – that was his name – climbed smoothly from the upper end of his high ladder way to the tippy-top of the 25-meter oak and began pruning away, alternating handsaw and chainsaw while just holding on with his toes, moving around among the limbs with the grace of one who has done this sort of thing for a long, long time, until the oak looked very slim and stylish; he said it would grow into a nice shape henceforth and not grow any taller. We were reassured.

While he was preparing his solo felling of the huge dead cedar that stood only one meter from our new tile roof waiting for a hurricane, we asked him about the questionable chestnut tree that stands in the garden a few meters from said roof. He gave the tree a brief glance, said it had insect problems, would last maybe another 5-7 years, then would fall, but no immediate worry.

Then he revved up his chainsaw (a Shindaiwa 380), made some delicate surgical cuts in the big multi-ton dead cedar tree, now and then sighting along the intended path like a baseball pitcher, made a wedge out of a piece of my oak firewood, used a sledgehammer to drive it into the final cut, added another wider wedge a bit further over as he aimed some more and the tree wiggled at the top, rocked, tilted -- tilted more, then gave way with a crack and fell straight away from the house WHOOMP right between my rosemary and basil, which were stirred by the timber wind.

We talked while he ate his newspaper-wrapped simple bento lunch seated crosslegged on the deck, smiling and laughing at his own words, in a dialect I had to cut with a mental chainsaw. He'd been doing this work since he was young; lived alone, married twice, long ago, but it didn't take; cooks his own meals, grows his own rice, grows his own vegetables (why do otherwise, he said), makes his own sake, makes his own charcoal for cooking and heating, gave me the best intense course on chainsaw maintenance I ever had, then cut down the trees close in front of the house, felling them right where he aimed, sectioned them to the desired lengths and drove away.

What a guy.